Who was Pontius Pilate?

The man in the record

Pilate is one of the best-attested people in the Gospels. In 1961 archaeologists working in the Roman theater at Caesarea, on the coast of today’s Israel, found a building stone with a Latin inscription naming Pontius Pilatus, prefect of Judaea. Caesarea was the Roman capital of the province; Pilate came up to Jerusalem with troops at festivals like Passover, when the city filled with pilgrims.

The Roman historian Tacitus also names him. Writing about Nero’s persecution of Christians, he explains that their founder, Christus, “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus” (Annals 15.44).

A hard governor

The Gospels show a Pilate who hesitates. Other writers of the time remember a harsher man. Philo of Alexandria accuses him of executions without trial. Josephus tells of soldiers clubbing protesters in Jerusalem. In AD 36, after his troops attacked a crowd of Samaritans, the governor of Syria removed him and sent him to Rome to answer for it. After that, history loses track of him.

Pilate and Jesus

At dawn the council hands Jesus over to Pilate. Most historians think only the Roman governor could order an execution, and the charge is now political. In all four Gospels Pilate asks the same question: “Are you the King of the Jews?” In John, Jesus speaks of truth, and Pilate answers with a question of his own.

Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” When he had said this, he went out again to the Jews, and said to them, “I find no basis for a charge against him.”

Each Gospel adds its own details. Only Luke has Pilate send Jesus to Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee. Only Matthew has Pilate’s wife warn him about a dream, and Pilate washing his hands before the crowd: “I am innocent of the blood of this righteous person” (Matthew 27:24). The custom of freeing a prisoner at the feast, which leads to Barabbas, appears in no source outside the Gospels. But the decision is Pilate’s alone. He has Jesus flogged and crucified, under a placard in three languages: “JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS.” When the chief priests object, he answers, “What I have written, I have written” (John 19:22).

Why his name is in the Creed

Christians still say his name every week. The Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed declare that Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” pinning the faith to a datable moment in Roman history. Later traditions went in opposite directions. Some made Pilate a villain who took his own life; the Ethiopian Orthodox Church honors him and his wife as saints. And Matthew’s line in which the crowd accepts the blame was later used against all Jews. In 1965 the Catholic Church rejected that blame in Nostra Aetate.